Those 7 Essays All At Once

The previous six essays form a six piece monograph. Since everything comes up in reverse order, you may see the last one first. This is just a note that you might want to go back to the introductory post that introduces the six essays. It can be found here. Happy reading.

Prayer as Social Justice

A couple of years ago I thought I needed a change because my life had become too insular. One of the things I thought I needed to do was re-engage my social justice sensibilities that had dulled and been slowly moved to the back of the shelf since leaving the Presbyterian Church some twenty years …

My Neighbor and Myself

My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous; and he is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world. …

A Brief Introduction to the Prayer of the Heart

When growing up I was taught that God wasn’t Santa Clause and prayer wasn’t just asking God for stuff. In order to avoid the pitfalls of just asking for stuff I was taught to pray the ACTS way: Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, Supplication. As my sense of prayer grew more sophisticated I realized that all prayer, …

The Schism of the Systems: Culture in Crisis

In the final section of The Origins and History of Consciousness, Erich Neumann offers an explanation of one of the great concerns facing modern society: the breakdown of civil discourse and the apparent accompanying breakdown of culture itself. The original German version of the book was written in 1949, so the context of his ideas …

Utopia, Dystopia, the Social Gospel, and the Return of Christ

Just as our concept of mishpat and tzedakah is flawed (see the previous essay), so our concept of social justice has been twisted by historical trends, and as a result, our confidence in its efficacy is flawed. This twisting of perceptions can be traced back to the Industrial Revolution which not only led to change …

Judgment and Mercy

I have talked about the problem of translating “justice” (Hebrew is mishpat) previously in essays such as My Sojourn with the Social Justice Warriors, The Really Hard Part, and Oppressed-a-non. I want to revisit this topic in more depth as a starting place for this series of essays because we tend to turn the meaning …

Introduction to Prayer as Social Justice

In a previous essay I made the claim, in the context of Carl Jung’s Hero model of transforming the world, that liberal Protestantism is extroverted in sensibility while Orthodoxy is centroverted. In trying to sort out the implications of this, I keep circling back to the role of prayer in our efforts toward a just …

Is Evangelicalism Introverted?

So the inevitable question from the previous essay has come up. I proposed, using Neumann’s categories, that mainline Protestantism espouses an extroverted version of the Gospel while Orthodoxy espouses a centroverted version. This week someone said, “Well then, that must mean that Evangelicalism is an introverted version of the Gospel.”I didn’t even have to think …

Social Justice: Some Thoughts

I’m reading Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness. It is a summary of Carl Jung’s work, and Jung (who wrote the Foreword) sounds a bit jealous of just how well Neumann brought all of Jung’s disparate thoughts together into a single whole.In the second part of the book Neumann explains the idea of …